Benton Paiute Tribe Moves for TRO to Halt July 7 BLM Helicopter Gather; Federal Court Confronts Section 106 Question on Compressed Clock
On July 4, 2026, the Utu Utu Gwaitu Paiute Tribe of the Benton Paiute Reservation filed a motion for a temporary restraining order in Utu Utu Gwaitu Paiute Tribe v. U.S. Department of the Interior, No. 2:26-cv-02323-DAD-JDP (E.D. Cal.), asking the court to enjoin the Bureau of Land Management's July 7 helicopter operation that would remove roughly 624 wild horses — some 90 percent of the herd — from Montgomery Pass Wild Horse Territory.12
The TRO motion, filed four days after the June 29 complaint, presses the same statutory framework: Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, 54 U.S.C. § 306108; Executive Orders 13175 and 13007; Joint Secretarial Order No. 3403; and the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 706.1 The Tribe argues that the July 7 gather is imminent and irreversible: horses removed from ancestral lands cannot be returned to the herd, and the low-altitude helicopter operation will disturb cultural landscape values before any court can adjudicate the underlying § 106 identification-and-consultation duty.1
The Tribe's Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, Ronda Kauk, submitted a formal Section 106 consultation request to Interior, BLM, and the Forest Service on April 23, 2026.2 The complaint alleges the agencies never responded, never identified cultural resources within the operation's footprint, and never assessed helicopter noise and disturbance on the Benton Paiute cultural landscape before scheduling the gather.2 The Tribe's July 2 update to supporters described the pleading in blunt terms: "We have been ignored."3
Commentary from federal Indian law observers followed within days. A July 6 opinion column argued that the litigation was being mischaracterized in regional media as a horse-management dispute, when the operative claims turn on federal historic-preservation and consultation duties — not on advocacy-group positions about herd size.4 The case is assigned to Judge Dale A. Drozd, with Magistrate Judge Jeremy D. Peterson; TRO briefing is proceeding on a compressed schedule tied to the July 7 gather date.1
Whether or not the TRO issues, this pleading is now the template. It reframes a routine BLM gather as a federal undertaking with Section 106 identification-and-consultation obligations, layers on EO 13175 government-to-government duties, and invokes the trust responsibility recognized in Joint Secretarial Order No. 3403. Practitioners advising BLM state offices, THPOs, and consulting parties on herd-management undertakings, cultural-landscape identification, or emergency programmatic actions on Great Basin lands should read the motion papers before their next scoping meeting.
